(NEXSTAR) – Hospitals, nursing homes and other medical facilities are struggling to gain ground on a drug-resistant and deadly fungus that has infected at least 7,000 people in 2025, according to tracking by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Candida auris, a fungus that was first reported in the United States in 2016, has spread rapidly over the past few years. It can live on surfaces for long periods of time before spreading to patients through catheters, breathing tubes or IVs.
Some strains of the fungus are considered a superbug because they are resistant to all types of antibiotics normally used to treat fungal infections. While healthy people may be able to fight the infection on their own, the fungus can be deadly in healthcare settings where it spreads, where people are often sick and vulnerable.
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“If you get infected with this pathogen that is resistant to any treatment, there is no treatment that we can give you to help fight it. You are all on your own,” said Melissa Nolan, assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina, to Nexstar.
The drug resistance of the fungus has made it especially difficult to control. More than half of the states reported clinical cases of Candida auris in 2025, the CDC reported. With a week of data left in the year, the annual case count is approaching last year’s record figure of more than 7,500 cases.
See which states are reporting the most cases of Candida auris in the map below. Data were missing for two states: Alabama and Florida.
Some scientists theorize that climate change is contributing to the spread of Candida auris and pathogens like it.
Historically, fungi have had a hard time surviving in the warm body temperature of our bodies, microbiologist Arturo Casadevall, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Associated Press. But as the climate warms, the fungi are adapting.
“We have tremendous protection against environmental fungi because of our temperature. However, if the world is warming and the fungi begin to adapt to higher temperatures as well, some … will reach what I call the temperature barrier, “where they can survive in the human body, said Casadevall.
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In the past, the CDC estimated that “based on information from a limited number of patients, 30-60% of people with C. auris infections died. However, many of these people had other serious illnesses that also increased their risk of death.”
A study published in July, which looked at patients with Candida auris primarily in Nevada and Florida, found that more than half of the patients needed to be admitted to the intensive care unit and more than a third needed mechanical ventilation. More than half of the patients, whose average age was between 60 and 64 years, also needed a blood transfusion.
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